Slightly screwy, unadjustable embed code aside, the dialogue-tree trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience (above) really shouldn’t have the start-up freeze-capture of the above two dudes, since it’s adult film starlet Sasha Grey who plays the high-end flesh-peddler offering the film’s centerpiece transactional attraction, but what are you gonna do? Pushing the notion of an hourly-rate comparison between Gray’s character and her boyfriend, a personal trainer, is a good tack, and not at all thematically irrelevant, since the movie underscores our shared societal obsession with money and security (are they the same?), all against the backdrop of a crumbling economy.

The film itself, which I caught earlier this week, is intriguing on a couple levels — more on it soon — but also kind of an unfulfilled premise. It works chiefly as a crystal-clear, extended metaphor for Soderbergh’s view of the (legit) film industry, but it also left me wanting more. From the hip, I’d slot it somewhere between Bubble (which I rather adored) and Full Frontal (which I rather didn’t) in Soderbergh’s recent dig-vid experimental canon.